Moral Judgments in Russian Culture: Universality and Cultural Specificity

Abstract

Individuals often deliver rapid, automatic judgments of right and wrong, suggesting that there is an implicit system of knowledge that may guide our moral judgments. Some authors have argued that the principles guiding this system are universal, part of our human endowment. Tests of this hypothesis require rich cross-cultural evidence which is presently limited. Here we extend the current cross-cultural evidence by testing Russian subjects. We focus on three psychological distinctions concerning the nature of permissible harm that, thus far, show a fair degree of uniformity among several English-speaking countries (USA, UK, Canada): (1) action-based harms are worse than omission-based harms; (2) means-based barms are worse than side-effects; and (3) contact-based barms are worse tban non-contact-based barms. Overall, Russian subjects' judgments were mediated by these three distinctions. There were, however, some notable crosscultural differences: in contrast with the English-speaking countries, Russian subjects tended to avoid extreme judgments favoring tbe middle of the scale anchored at permissible; bowever, when they used the extremes, they were more likely to judge cases as forbidden, and rarely as obligatory. We discuss these results in light of the role of biological constraints on cross-cultural variation.

The prerequisites of prosocial behavior in human ontogeny

“…As a perspective for future studies, we also propose that dynamics of prosocial decisions may be characterized with intercultural differences. Given that even simple verbal discrimination task performance (Sozinov et al, 2015), as well as social (and moral) decisions in grown-ups (Arutyunova et al, 2013;Simpson and Willer, 2008) differ between cultures, the prosocial behavior may develop in culture-specific ways.…”

“…From this perspective, a new behavior is subserved by co-activation of systems that had emerged during episodes of learning at successive stages of ontogenesis (Quintana, 1998;Arutyunova et al, 2013). A system elaborated during learning is a set of brain and body elements activity of which provides resultative interaction with the environment (Anokhin, 1974).…”

Sociocultural Influences on Moral Judgments: East–West, Male–Female, and Young–Old

“…Previous work, using a well-controlled battery of moral dilemmas and a web-based methodology, revealed that subjects’ moral judgments of harm are mediated by the three moral principles, irrespective of whether they are from a heterogeneous Western population (e.g., USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Dutch, urban-educated Mayan; Cushman et al, 2006; Hauser et al, 2009; Abarbanell and Hauser, 2010) or Russian population (Arutyunova et al, 2013). Similarly, Barrett et al’ (2016) study of small scale societies shows that intentionality plays a significant role in most moral judgments, but with some variation in the magnitude of its impact.…”

“…Our previous work on moral judgments also showed that Russian individuals overall make less extreme judgments than their Western English-speaking counterparts (Arutyunova et al, 2013). Differences in response style do not alter cross-cultural comparisons of averaged responses (Chen et al, 1995).…”

“…They were next presented with 32 moral scenarios (for content of original scenarios in English and their translation into Russian, see Appendix in Arutyunova et al, 2013) in a randomized order. Of these scenarios, 30 involved a situation where a protagonist made a choice to sacrifice one person in order to save five other people.…”